Piloting Aircraft in PlanetSide 2

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ESF Nose Gun Damage Analyzer (Update)

No longer do you have to calculate the damage values of your nose gun with your lone, lorn slide rule anymore.

Update: The Needler’s base magazine size received five more rounds; the spreadsheet has been updated accordingly.

There has always been a yawning gap when it comes to raw solid data on the ESFs, and Sony has never been particularly forthcoming to fill said gap. If some few individuals would not painstakingly mine portions of the data themselves, the majority of aviators in PlanetSide 2 would still be relying on sheer gut feeling, misconception, and hearsay (some still do) when evaluating ESFs, their properties, performance and weaponry.

Therefore I was even more baffled at the gold mine of data that RedDominion made available back in July 2013 with this gigantic spreadsheet of his — some kind of ESF nose gun damage analyzer, for a lack of a better term — providing actual, reliable time-to-kill (TTK) and damage-per-second (DPS) calculations for all the ESF rotary nose guns.

Not only could pilots now reliably compare the properties of the ESF cannons nose-to-nose in a convenient manner but the spreadsheet would also update itself dynamically depending on your personal values for accuracy, set fight range, and even chosen nose gun upgrades (magazine size or reload speed).

Suffice it to say that the spreadsheet has come a long way since. Bit for bit data for the default nose guns was added, new features were introduced, and after the release of PU02 the document was once again updated with the newest set of nose gun specifics.

More recently, the document received a major formatting overhaul including the addition of annotations that should help new readers come to terms with the overwhelming amount of data they are being offered by the spreadsheet.

Therefore, instead of writing an elaborate piece on the rise of the default nose guns after PU02, I thought I just leave you to the actual raw data at hand. May you come to your own conclusions in regards to which nose guns are currently best and why.